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I'm trying to communicate with my hardware board from a Ubuntu installed PC. I've used a USB to serial cable, and the serial cable is connected to the hardware and the USB is connected to the USB port of my desktop. I used minicom and it works well like I'm able to see the output of my hardware. But the issue is I'm not able to enter anything. It is not recognizing my keyboard input. Without that its totally useless. Could someone help me in this issue.

J. Steen
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iMSivam
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  • Can u pls try with "Serial Port Terminal" application ubuntu??. – Jeyaram Sep 25 '12 at 07:04
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    I had a similar issue, it turned out to be because I had hardware flow control enabled (it's enabled by default in minicom), but I was connected to hardware that didn't support it. Hence minicom just waited indefinitely for the serial port to be ready. – gbmhunter Jan 05 '14 at 23:33
  • Solved for me. Using a PocketBeagle + BaconBites cape. – Filipe Rodrigues Mar 12 '18 at 23:21
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    hardware flow control is item F located in the in the serial port config menu. sudo minicom -s then go to serial port settings – user391339 Mar 26 '18 at 18:57
  • Thanks, does anybody know how to turn that `hardware flow control` from the command line, when launching minicom? – Chan Kim Aug 18 '22 at 04:46

2 Answers2

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Knowing what the device is would help to answer this question.

If you see good output from your device then most likely the software side of things work well. This is good news. The problem could be:

  • The device does not echo your input. Does it react to your input in any other way? You may turn on the local echo feature in the minicom software if you want to see your input while the device does not support echo.
  • The device is faulty. This could be a hardware problem such as bad contact, or a firmware issue with the device.

You may also try alternative software to minicom. This will not fix the problem, but may help you to find the cause more easily. One such software with GUI is gtkterm. Install and use like this. All options and configuration are avbailable through menus:

sudo apt-get install gtkterm
gtkterm
elomage
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  • Huh, gtkterm works in my situation but not minicom even though the settings are presumably the same. Wonder what it could be... – Gillespie Mar 15 '17 at 19:15
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    @elomage I faced the same issue with Ubuntu hosted on virtualbox. `gtkterm` seems to be a life-saver :) – RajSanpui Mar 14 '20 at 17:55
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I have experienced something similar and it ended up being a driver issue with the card I was using. Upon installing a different version of the driver, it worked without any issues.

Ryan Kempt
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